Interior Lighting HOBBS 1985.5 hrs

Last week was very productive and my biggest 'solo' weekly hours logged so far on the project, with a whopping 30.5 hrs. I'm already on my way to another big week this week. Its taking me longer to finish this thing than I expected, and I am definitely behind where I thought I would be at this point, but it isn't for lack of effort that's for sure.

I ended up redoing some of the center console as I didn't like where I originally mounted my fuel selector. I did another faceplate and move the selector down a little...I like this much better. The black rectangle is where I am considering mounting my aux fuel pump switches.

I looked everywhere for the ELT annunciator panel...finally finding it back at home on my workbench under some stuff. Nothing to mounting this. Its close enough to reach from the pilot seat but also out of the way as much as possible. 

After lots of thinking about wiring in my Aveo switches, I decided I wanted the LED's on (lit up) whenever the panel lighting was on (vs. just coming on when they are switched on). The other dilemma was to wire then in series or in parallel. Bill, my hangar mate did his in series and they look fine...but my circuits training tells me that each LED in series might be dimmer than the last as they act like a resistor?? Not sure if that is correct, but I decided to wire all of my switches to a bus bar which will tie directly to my panel dimmer switch. I like this setup. For the ground wires, I just daisy chained them together...no need for individual grounds on each switch.

I'm starting to wire in my Comm's, i.e., building the harnesses. For the PAR100EX, I needed to solder my molex pins instead of crimping. I had never done this before, and they didn't teach us this in my SportAir class...I guess because most people just crimp? After asking my hangar mate, Bill, I was off and running with a little coaching from him. Basically, you will need some flux to tackle this task. The flux, from what I can tell, allows the solder to flow more evenly. Worked pretty easy. Still learning new stuff every day...

When I get the chance, it really is fun to play around with my interior lighting...good inspiration! After getting all of my lighting terminated properly, I did a test run. This pic shows all of my interior lighting on...full power. As you can see it lights up the cockpit quite bright.

My lighting strategy is this. I originally planned an LED light strip for the glareshield since everyone does that. Two things steered me away from that. One, the carbon fiber aerosport panel doesn't lend itself well to adding a glareshield strip. And two, with the modern EFIS panels these days along with lighted rocker switches, what exactly do I need a glareshield light for?? Nothing that I can tell. So, this is my new layout:

• LED strips on each side panel, these will be controlled with the panel dimmer
• All Aveo LED's will also be controlled with the panel dimmer
• LED floor flood lights (2) in the front cockpit in case you need to find something on the floor...these will have a separate dimmer (#2) as I don't expect these will be on during normal flight
• LED baggage floor flood lights, again, more of a courtesy light--these will be tied to dimmer switch #2 also
• I have a rocker switch to control the baggage dome light
• I have a rocker switch to control the map light

I realize I probably went way overboard, but hey, its cheap, low current draw and negligible weight...so why not? Oh, and its fun. It, no doubt, will look awesome on night flights. The wiring of all these lights is kind of tedious though...that's the downside.

These two pics show my playing around with different dimmer settings. It works great! As you can see, even without a glareshield LED strip, I get plenty of light coming off the side panel LED's to give some light to the panel.

Lastly, here is a video of me playing around with panel dimmer. The pulsing you see in the video is just the camera struggling with the dim light...not the lighting system itself. I ended up working late and spending the night at the hangar one night last week so this was my entertainment for the evening!